"She once complained that her stories were like 'birds bred in cages,' but that concentrated atmosphere, that claustrophobic hothouse of emotion, was her talent. Her stories were little masterpieces of compression: she succinctly contained whole lifetimes in a few pages, every moment loaded with as much as it could bear."
"In spite of its romantic frisson, the position of muse is very vague and largely thankless for the muse herself."
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Source: Katie Roiphe (2013). “In Praise of Messy Lives”, p.61, Canongate Books
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